Men Think About Sleep & Food as Much as Sex

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Men think about sex every seven seconds, right? Not according to
a new study that finds men ponder sleep and food as much as they
do sex.

The median number of thoughts
about sex by college-age men was 18 times a day to women's 10
times a day, the study found. But the men also thought about food
and sleep proportionately more.

"In other words, there was nothing special about sexual
thoughts," study researcher Terri Fisher, a psychologist at The
Ohio State University, Mansfield, told LiveScience. "Males
thought more about any of the health-related thoughts compared to
females, not just thoughts about sex."

Sex on the brain

The "men think about sex every seven seconds" axiom is an urban
legend, Fisher said. But there is little reliable research on how
often men and women really do have
sexual thoughts. Most studies have asked people to think back
across their day or week and try to remember how many sex
thoughts they had -- a method that doesn't always provide
reliable results. [ Top
10 Urban Legends ]

Fisher and her colleagues instead asked 163 college women and 120
college men to carry around small golf-stroke tally counters. So
they wouldn't be biased to think about sex, the students were
told they'd be asked about health-related thoughts, Fisher said.
Next, the researchers told 60 percent of the students to click
the counter whenever they thought about sex. Others were
instructed to tally their thoughts on food and sleep.

"The stereotype is that men think about sex constantly and women
rarely [think about it]," Fisher said. But that's not what she
and her colleagues found. There was a broad range in the number
of sex thoughts, from several participants who recorded one
thought a day, to a male participant who recorded 388 thoughts in
a day. Factoring in the participant's
sleep time, his 388 thoughts broke down to having a sexual
thought every 158 seconds, Fisher said, still far fewer than the
"every seven seconds" legend would suggest.

On average, Fisher wrote, the men in the study thought about sex
slightly more than once each waking hour and women about half
that. However, men paid no greater attention to sex than they did
food and sleep, Fisher found. That difference could be a real one
in which men are just more aware of their physical state at any
given time, she said, or it could be that men are more
comfortable clicking the tally counter to record their
body-centric thoughts.

"There are stereotypes about women and sexuality and about
women and food," Fisher said, and women who indicated on
questionnaires that they cared more about what others thought
about them were less likely to report food and sex-based
thoughts. They were equally like to report their sleep-based
thoughts, which aren't so subject to stereotypes, Fisher said.
The finding suggests that women, but not men, are influenced by
social desirability concerns in what they were thinking or what
they would admit to thinking.

The study has limitations, including the fact that people tend
not to have isolated thoughts. The data also doesn't show whether
an individual thought is a one-second passing notion or a full-on
10-minute
sexual fantasy. The study was limited to college students,
but Fisher currently has research under way on adults ages 25 and
up. She said she hopes to get to the truth of the
sex difference stories that get passed around in popular
culture.

"When people hear about some of these differences, I think
sometimes they don't question it because it fits the stereotypes
we have of men and women," Fisher said. "When you stop and take a
closer look at the origins of some of these alleged differences,
they sometimes have no empirical support."